It’s all pretty depressing to contemplate though, since the Tier 1 General Migrant visa program(me) is closed and so, even if I do finish my degree at last, there’s no avenue for me to move absent an employer sponsoring it. I understand unemployment politics and immigration politics and blah blah blah, but seriously, I know enough Brits who want to come here, can’t we just arrange a one-for-one trade? I promise I’m a really productive person! And it’s not like I won’t be paying taxes in both nations anyways!

But I’m over at least the initial shock and bereavement, I guess. The first few days were pretty bad. The day I got the news, ironically, I had tickets to go see Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me — because it had been on my “things to do before I flee the country” list. I made it to the show, but I don’t remember much about it other than Peter Sagal had a bad head cold he heroically powered through, and Paula Poundstone cracked kleenex jokes at him. I know I made it home before I started crying again, but it was a pretty narrow miss.

I had started to seriously move on getting rid of stuff, of course. I mean, I started getting rid of the easy stuff to get rid of — sorting through my clothes more viciously to donate, selling books — after I got the “it’s really happening” in January. (On my birthday. Oh, the irony, it is thick on the ground in this tale.) I was pretty upset about the gaps on my bookshelves, after it all fell through. Not so much because the stuff was gone for no reason, so much as because the space where the stuff used to be is a constant reminder of what could have been. But, after a lot of sulking and thought, I think I’m going to continue getting rid of stuff. I had been planning to move with nothing more than my checked baggage, my two kitties in their carriers, my spinning wheel, and my bike… and if I’m prepared to do that, that means I’m prepared to live without all this stuff. A sewing machine I use once a year, that’s just not a significant need in my life… all the yarn that had been in my stash for a few years, I wasn’t going to use it any time soon anyways. It’s fine. It’s all fine. Stuff is just baggage. I don’t need stuff to be happy. I need space more than I need stuff. So, I keep on sorting through my stuff and dragging it off to the Brown Elephant to donate. May it serve someone else well.

That said… once it all fell through, I did go buy a new bed. I’ve been putting that off for years, literally, partly because I always felt like I was on the cusp of moving (even though I’ve been in this apartment for five years; I’d moved about every two years for the past decade before that), and partly because I have this sort of ingrained middle-class resistance to buying anything that I don’t absolutely need. And my futon is, technically, fine. I mean, it’s not broken. I can sleep on it. I don’t sleep well on it, I have insomnia problems and I remember distinctly last summer just feeling like I could never sleep off my tri training aches and pains. Well, fuck it. I’m not doing another summer of tri training aching like hell because I sleep on a (now) 19 year old shitty futon. I’m not a kid, and I have the money, so I bought a new damn bed like a grown-ass adult. I just went in to Macy’s, kicked off my shoes, curled up on a bunch of display models, and bought the one I almost fell asleep on.

It’s not England, but it’ll do for now…because what else have I got?

I’m currently trying to get a position in London through work. If it works out, it will literally be a dream come true. Maybe not necessarily the job (my dream job is, after all, driving a train for the Underground. I don’t think they sponsor visas, though), but certainly the location, and I do like what I do for a living (even though it’s not driving a train. I mean, trains! Best ever!). We’ll see how it goes. I’m admittedly a little afraid to say anything publicly in case I jinx it. Nothing is certain until the paperwork is signed, of course. But I’ve gotten the cats microchipped, and I’ve started selling off my stuff, Just In Case the stars align. Y’all know how it goes.

It’s a little peculiar how this feels though. On the verge of, as I said, having a dream come true — comes tension. It’s all the stupidest of things. Should I sell xyzpdq? What if I don’t get the job and want my xyzpdq? I had that happen with my drum carder. For those of you who aren’t yarn spinners, a drum carder is a rather pricey gadget that you use to prepare fiber for spinning. I bought mine a couple of years ago, and I loved it… I used it to prep art yarn batts, or prep fleece, or just generally make fiber for yarns for fun. I saved up for it, $25 a month for quite a while, to be able to buy a KitchenAid, and in the end I decided I would get more use from a carder than a KitchenAid, and I finally got it and I loved it… and a few weeks ago, I sold it. Because it wasn’t important enough to make the cut. If I pull this off, I want to pull it off in the least baggagey way possible, and that means not carting around boxes of shit I’ve carried with me since forever. I sold it to two friends, who are actually the fine ladies behind YarnCon (which, if you are a Chicagoan and a knitter or a spinner, you should certainly be familiar with!), and when Natalia picked it up from me she was practically rubbing her hands in glee at getting to process a particular fleece she had. But, all the same, there’s no amount of sending something you love on to a new home where it will be loved that cancels out the sense of pre-emptive regret, the “what if this doesn’t happen, and I’ve sold my drum carder for no good reason.” The price isn’t the most major factor (though it was definitely a sale at a loss) so much as it is, in economic terms, the opportunity cost. The “what-if” cost, the hedge against failure. The things that I have, I bought for a reason; if I sell them off and I wind up losing out on the London opportunity, I’ve not only lost out on my dream but also on the things I had before I was tempted at all.

I suppose it’s a lesson in materiality. I try not to be overly attached to material goods. I live in a small apartment, and I don’t have a lot of stuff in general. I had a CD collection which I did prize, and quite a lot of vinyl for a dilettante, and a fair number of books. Those are mostly gone now. The CDs are nearly all gone, but for one last box that I’ll haul off to sell; and the books are down to about one shelf on a bookcase, which — the more that I think about it — can be cut down even further; and the vinyl, well, maybe I’ll bequeath that to Michael. The more I think about things, I really think I can move with just a couple bags of clothing, my spinning wheel (only that because a Lendrum is pretty expensive in the UK), and my bike (because I love Ella Mae so, and she’s all tricked out with perfectly fitted aerobars and fancy waterproof German saddlebags and everything, these days). But it’s still a little confounding to try and balance the desire to get rid of extraneous stuff against the desire to have all of said extraneous stuff until the last possible minute because, after all, everything could always fall through.

I really, really hope everything doesn’t fall through. For so many reasons, and the stuff is the least of them.

If you click through to the Flickr photo and hover your mouse over the times, you can see notes with all my goals for my times. If you don’t want to do that, let me just say: I nailed those suckers. Woo!

I should write a real race report later, but I’m pretty tired right now. (I’ve been up for 15 hours, and I spent 4 of those endurance racing, another one getting to and from the endurance race, and 15 minutes sitting in a shallow tub of ice water. It’s been a long day.) So here are the highlights:

SWIM
OMG, WTF, BBQ. So Hurricane Irene was torturing New Yorkers (or at least it was supposed to, to listen to some of them banging on about it. Like my friend Natalie said, if there was a Lake Michigan hurricane that came in and blasted Chicago, the only news coverage we’d get would be “Make sure you have a canoe, and allow extra travel time to get to work tomorrow.” But I digress.), but meanwhile, some tendrils of it were stretching across the continent and stirring up crap around here (or at least I am blaming Irene for this crap). We had a forecast that called for winds out of the north-northeast at 15-23 mph through the early morning to the afternoon, and that came true. The lake was incredibly choppy — not wavy; wavy is different. This was just a hot mess of unpredictable, fast, short, and randomly directional waves. Plus, the swim route was shaped like a letter J, where the first 1/4 mi was south, then you did a U-turn around a buoy and came north for the remaining 3/4 mi. The winds were NNE. The water was moving SSW. We got to swim against that. It was the crazy icing on top of the flailing, splashing, kicking bumper cars madness of the swim.

I admit that, after my blog post the other day about the tri, I felt a little bad for that offhand crack about kicking people back if they kick me. I’m kind of a girl scout, so I was all “I shouldn’t say that, it’s meeeeeean to kick people.” After experiencing the Chicago Triathlon swim start in that water? Fuck that noise. You kick me, I kick you back. I seriously got through that batshit swim using a few advanced swimming techniques: 1) bilateral breathing. It was really important to be able to breath on both sides, not just the side I was most comfortable on, because that side was into the rising sun and the rising waves, so switching was really killer; 2) Rotation – I was able to kick my rotation way up more than I usually do in the pool, so I could get my face farther out of the water to breathe without inhaling water; and 3) mentally referring to anyone who pissed me off in any fashion, like the guy who couldn’t swim straight and kept swimming into my left side and pushing me out towards the boats so that I actually stopped and trod water long enough to let him get totally in front of me so I could get on his left side instead, as “green-cap fucksticks.” I’m sure that most people in the wave before mine, such as the two T2EA athletes who are obviously superior in every way, are very nice people, but a lot of them are very aggressive yet inept swimmers, aka “fucksticks,” and that wave had green caps, so the epithet “green-cap fuckstick” was coined. There were a few green-cap fucksticks wearing other colored caps, but I was trying to not inhale water, so I stuck with what worked: green-cap fucksticks. Oh, there were so many green-cap fucksticks. I think my on-goal swim time despite the water conditions working against me was largely due to my immense desire to get the hell away from all the other swimmers.

Then there was the 450 yard dash up the crumbly asphalt to transition. After I’d already been walking around all morning barefoot, including the 3/4 mi walk from transition to the swim start and a half-hour wait in line for a porta-potty, because I decided not to bring flip flops. DO NOT MAKE THIS MISTAKE. IT IS A HURTY ONE. And, oh yeah, the time for this gets applied to your official swim time. I did splits, and this took 4 minutes, which means my swim time was 39m, which was under my 40m goal, so HA, take that, stupid asphalt. Ow, my poor feet.

T1
I actually rocked this one. I ran across the grass (sweet cool, cool, soft grass…) and through the route I’d scouted and walked earlier, found my row with no trouble (it RULES having the rack row with the recycling bins at both ends), found my bike with no trouble (thanks to it having a big bunch of red silk flowers on the stem, the blue masking tape arrow on the ground, and oh yeah, it was second from the end nearest bike out/bike in), toweled my feet off to attempt to get the dried cut grass off (which failed), threw my helmet on, rolled my socks on, put my shoes on, pulled my bike gloves out of my shorts legs (oh yeah, did I mention I forgot to leave my bike gloves in transition, which I realized when I got to the swim start, and my feet hurt so much I said “fuck it” to walking them back to transition, so I just shoved one inside each shorts leg before I put my wetsuit on), and ran for bike out. A volunteer and several spectators publicly admired my flowers, I shoved my gloves in my teeth, mounted the bike, and headed for the ramp up to Lake Shore Drive. I got up the ramp, over the bridge over the river, and once we had settled a little I pulled my gloves on. I like to think that it makes me look coordinated that I can pull that off – putting my gloves on with my teeth while biking in a straight line. I probably just look like some idiot who forgot to put her gloves on in transition. Whatever. It totally saves me like 45s in T1, so I’ll take the idiot look.

Then… oh yeah. Irene. Fucking Irene and her fucking bullshit headwind. What the hell. The first leg took me 30 minutes. I was Not Happy – 30 minutes x 4 legs = 2 hour bike; my goal was 1:45 atmost. But the headwind was transformed into a tailwind for the return south, which I forgot to hit the split button to stop when I turned around at Chicago Ave, but it was certainly a lot easier to bike. Then the turn back north, into that bitching bullshit headwind. I seriously was going up overpasses at like 10 mph, it was sad. (OTOH, those moments gave me opportunities to pass slowpokes and people on mountain bikes, so that was happy. I also passed one woman riding a bike with a full rack and two saddlebags, but I told her as I went that riding with the saddlebags made her super hardcore, so I don’t count her as a slowpoke.) The second and third legs combined were 46:35, which made me happy because I that meant my first south leg was 20m, which is way better than 30, and meant I could hopefully still manage under 1:45. The second leg south took me 26, and then I was back at transition. I deliberately let the gas out a little more on the last lap – telling myself this is my last race of the season, I don’t have to save anything up for tomorrow or later this week. I don’t know how much of an effect that had, but it was some nice mental encouragement.

I will say, I had a WHOLE lot of fun watching the traffic going the opposite direction and spotting people in T2EA jerseys and cheering for them. Also, I had a few riders tell me, usually while passing me, that they liked my flowers. So honestly, the bike was basically just full-on entertainment. I probably inhaled a thousand tiny insects just because I was grinning like a dork the whole time.

T2
My goal for this was 3m, which I didn’t make, even a little. I think it’s basically because there were a lot of people in the aisle trying to find their racks (again, recycling bin FTW) so I had to go at the pace of those in front of me, and transition was huge. I’m not sure why else it took me 5 freaking minutes. I pretty much took off my shoes, took off my gloves, pulled on my running shoes, slammed on my TriMonster visor, clipped on my race belt, and ran for run out. Granted, run out was a big twisty maze to get to (I should have retraced my swim in steps, but instead I went down the aisle outside and I think it made the route longer than it needed to be. But that was autopilot: that was how I walked to swim out, when I walked the route in transition. Next time, walk out the full transition, not just inspecting the ins/outs and scouting landmarks.

Run
Oh my. My good intentions to do the race as run 20m, walk 3m repeats failed immediately. I ran for like 3 minutes, then walked for 3. Then I ran for like 2, and walked for 3. It was a quick and humbling flameout. I don’t mean I hit the wall or anything, but I definitely had to mentally eat some humble pie about how well I’d be able to run off the 25mi bike. I wound up run/walking the entire course. My first mile was the slowest, and second mile the second slowest, though, so I did get better, and settled into a 14:30 average pace, down from a 15:07 average over the first two, so that’s ok. Not the 13:45 I had hoped for, but it’s not like it’s a crisis if I finished 5 minutes later. Besides, doing my second 10k as part of my first ever international triathlon – I think I’m entitled to guess wrong about how my legs might feel. Next time I’ll know better, and will have trained more. So it’s a learning experience.

I will say that the spectators along the run were fantastic. There were some really great signs – “Spandex makes you sexy!” and a few others. I tried to tell the signholders that I appreciated their work when I saw something good. I must have high-fived at least a dozen kids along the way, too.

The run took me back past the T2 tent at swim start (backed up against the run route at about .75 mi), did a little dance for them, then got about 10 high-fives and immeasurable cowbell, which was totally sweet. Seriously, I bet more than one person left that race today going “man, I’m training with T2 next year.” We were all yelling encouragement at each other the whole time. It was superfantastic. Spotting other T2 competitors and cheering them was like half the fun of my race – cheering them on kept me going. Them cheering me on kept me going well. :)

But I also was really buoyed by some friends who came out to watch me compete. Sean and Steph, of course, were there from the start – Steph came over to hug me while my wave was queued up waiting to jump in the water, and they spotted and cheered me at bike in, run out, and were waiting for me at the T2 booth after the finish. Sean also took some amazing photos. Liam was waiting for me at the Lake Shore Drive underpass just before finish, and then he ran around and met me after the finish. Trish was on the run route just the other side of the first T2 tent. Craig took some photos of me right after the finish and hung out for a while with me. And John brought his bike and cheered for me at bike in plus about three spots along the run! You guys all rule. Seriously, it meant a whole lot to have friends out there cheering for me. :)

Ok… that’s the totally superficial race recap. Now… I AM GOING TO SLEEP!

GIVE ME ALL YOUR MONIES!!!!!!

The long story made short: for a very, very long time I’ve wanted to relocate to the United Kingdom. Why? Part anglophilia, part whatever is the “anglophilia” equivalent when you like Scotland instead of England, part curiosity, part adventure. I want to see what it’s like to be somewhere else. I want to go places with cobbled roads and see only tiny cars parked weirdly (seriously, they park on sidewalks and stuff, it’s weird. I once got a parking ticket for parking on the left-hand side of a two-lane road (i.e., i had my nose pointed in the direction of oncoming traffic) in Chicago; that seems to be commonplace there). I want to see places where eggs are on the shelf instead of in the refrigerated case in the grocery store. I want to get confused when no one knows what I’m talking about when I ask where the shopping carts are, because I should have been asking for the trolleys. I want to live in a place where individual electrical outlets have on/off switches. I want to get all the jokes in Coupling the first time through without thinking to translate. I just want to do different things and see what it’s like to be a stranger in a strange land. I just want to see new things. I’ve wanted this for so long.

And I’ve put it off for so long and for so many reasons, chiefly money, and chiefly related to The Fucking House.

Two years ago, I decided that I was done waiting, and I was going to pull the trigger. I went to the UK Border Agency site and started seriously looking at the visa requirements. I counted up all my points. But with all the waiting and money drama, I’d gotten older, and they didn’t want old candidates with no qualifications, even if I am really a remarkably talented sysadmin and great at my work. But I determined that I could qualify for a visa if I had my bachelor’s, which I’d never been particularly motivated to finish. This, at last, was motivation. So I went back to school.

I started back in school, just turned 31, going to City Colleges of Chicago (i.e., community college) in January 2009. I figured that I’d go for a year or so at Harold Washington to finish my core requirements, then transfer to a four year university, and that would take me four years or so to finish at half-time. It was upsetting to think about a five year delay; for one thing — and I’m sorry for how this is going to sound, forty-plus-year-olds — I don’t want to be too old to enjoy the place once I get there. I want to still be young enough to go out dancing in a club if I want, and I want to still be whimsical and silly enough to do random things just because they make me happy. I don’t want to have bad knees so I can’t walk for long times, or be too worried about my retirement savings to decide randomly to take a £15 shitty RyanAir flight to the Continent for a bank holiday just because I can and because it takes me less time to get to France than it does now to get to Ohio. I know it sounds horrible, but I really want to go before I’m 35.

Those reasons are why it was such a massive, massive blow to me when in March of 2009, only two months after I’d finally gone back to school, determined to get my qualifications so I could apply for a visa, the regulations were changed to eliminate the points for a bachelor’s degree, and mandate a master’s at a minimum. I’m sure you can see the problem: with years to go before I’d even get the BA, adding on years to earn an MA — which I didn’t even want — was traumatic. An MA takes two years Stateside for a full time student. Working half time, it could easily take me four to five. Worse yet is the cost. If I were to complete a Master’s at DePaul, the price tag would be at least around $45k — on top of the $30k in student loans I’m taking on to finance the bachelor’s.

For something that started out as just wanting to go live in the UK for a year or two, to see what it was like, just to experience someplace different for a little while, this was turning into a monumental endeavor. At least four, maybe as long as nine or ten, years. Almost a hundred grand. For what? So I could spend fifteen grand relocating my entire life for a year or two? Ridiculous. Hopeless. Beyond stupid.

I was determined, and I am a goal-oriented person. So I just rewrote the plan to involve earning a master’s. I investigated master’s programs here and tried to figure out if I could make it work to quit working for two years to become a full-time grad student. (I really, really can’t. I can’t pay my own rent plus the mortgage on The Fucking House, plus eat, on a graduate stipend.) It finally occurred to me that I could hit two birds with one stone, if I went to grad school in the UK. So I started looking at schools, and costs. I figured that I could go overseas to school if I got financial aid to cover the £12k tuition, and had about another £15k in savings for the move and costs of living, etc. I looked at schools. I figured out the application details. I started saving up.

(That saving up is one of the reasons I still don’t have cable, incidentally. I gave it up years back so I could put that money towards getting out of credit card debt. These days, my condo building actually includes cable, but I’d have to pay for the box to hook it up. So I don’t have cable. It’s not like I’m missing much anyway — like I have time to watch television. Over-the-air gets me House and Fringe, and Netflix gets me anything else. So I’m cable-free. I occasionally feel like an out-of-touch weenie, when all my friends are talking about something that’s only on cable, or pestering me about if I watched the latest True Blood or Mad Men, but for the most part I get by.)

I sacrificed my cash savings, though, when I took summer vacation this year. It was a really hard decision to make. But I was so burnt out, and work was starting to melt down, so I decided that it was worth it. I blew it all. By the time my first paycheck from my new job hit, I was down to $73 in checking and savings combined. Ouch. Quite a comedown. It’s worth saying that I wouldn’t have blown it all if I still hadn’t been paying for THE FUCKING HOUSE while jobless, so thanks for that, Mom, but still, I knew what I was getting into when I quit.

And I was getting burned out by school. I’ve been back for two years, which means for two years I have had no evenings to myself, no weekends without thinking I need to be doing homework. Any time I’ve done something fun, like the annual Brainiversary weekend trip to Vegas with my dear friends, or going to my honorary nephew’s high school graduation party, or just sitting watching TV and knitting, I’ve done while feeling guilty that I should be doing schoolwork instead. Holidays are no holiday: I should be doing my independent study work. I have at least six papers to write for that, not including my capstone project which is a big long research project. I don’t honestly have free time. I have less guilty time, while doing schoolwork, and more guilty time, when I’m not. The idea of having five full weekday evenings to myself with no responsibility beyond watching Hell’s Kitchen is alien. Plus a weekend! Imagine a whole entire weekend with no responsibility other than doing the laundry! It’s mindboggling. Free time without strings or guilt has become a luxury I literally can no longer imagine.

This summer, with its two horrible classes — one actually a bad class, with bad subject material (i.e., no forethought, no academic rigor, no useful anything gained from it), and the other just a class totally foreign and alienating because it took me so far out of my comfort zone — really broke me. I couldn’t wait to register for autumn quarter and get into some better classes. And I’ve got them — this quarter I got two great classes! But I’m still burnt out. I can barely drag myself to do the work. I was planning to finish up in two more quarters, and graduate in June of 2011, originally… but lately, to save my sanity, I decided to take winter quarter off from school. And maybe spring as well. (I’m actually committed to one class in spring quarter, but The Plan was to take three. So taking just the one, which only comes up once a year and I had to register for in July of this year, is basically taking the quarter off, I think. Anyways, that keeps my student status alive so I could conceivably take winter, spring, and summer off and still retain my library privileges for my independent study, which was what had me concerned.) I have to maintain my 4.0 in order to get into grad school, because I’ll need an Upper Honors-equivalent to get into grad school in the UK, and Upper Honors-equivalent means a 4.0. And I don’t think I can pull off 4.0-quality work going forward, the way I feel right now. I’m so stressed out already I can’t even count on sleeping through the night, even after taking a summer to decompress. So I figured that taking some time off from school was the right decision, even if it set me back by a year on getting into grad school.

But this morning I was talking to some friends, and I realized it’d been a while since I’d gone back to the Border Agency web page to see if, by any chance, anything changed. So I went back. And everything has changed!

They’ve redone it again, since the 2009 re-do. The number of required points has gone up, but they’ve changed the age strata — now I can get points up to age 36 — and they’ve redone the salaries; previously capped at about £45k/pa, now you can get points for salaries up to about £150k/pa (ha ha ha I should be so lucky). But most importantly: bachelor’s degrees are worth 30 points again!

Ergo, with my current age, current salary, current English speaking ability, cash on hand, and with the bachelor’s degree I soon will have: I will have enough points to apply for a UK Tier 1 (General Migrant) visa.

As T. says: Basically, by eliminating the grad school requirement, Parliament has had me win a $100k lottery, in terms of what I won’t have to spend to get there.

So, at this point, all day I’ve been in a giddy sort of “oh my god you guys they changed it I don’t have to go to grad school after all oh my god you guys” haze. I only spent a couple minutes looking at the site this morning because I was at work, but as soon as I got home, I read the brief to confirm. And sure enough — 30 points for a bachelor’s. I can hardly believe it. All my fretting and worry and sturm und drang about a $45k MA I don’t even want … irrelevant! So long as I can stick it out and finish this bachelor’s, so long as they don’t change the rules on me again, I’m golden. I can finally try for this visa that I’ve wanted to get, so I can move overseas like I’ve wanted for so long. It is, literally, a dream come true, because I’ve been hoping since early 2009 that they’d undo the bachelor’s negation, so I had a chance in hell of getting overseas before I died. I can hardly believe it. Truthfully, and knowing that, especially if I take time off to recover from burnout, they might change the rules back, I still believe it could all fall through. But for today? Today, I’ll take this one slice of good news, the best thing that’s happened to me since the start of 2010.

So, despite the fact that this is zomg the recession!!!!!11!!!!!!1!!1!!! and all, I went to my boss and said “Hey, I’m kind of burnt out, and I think I’m going to leave, so let’s figure out an exit strategy.” And that’s what we did. I wound up giving three weeks’ notice, and basically puttered around the office answering questions and emailing people inane “oh here’s an idea I had to solve that one problem” (because of course I didn’t want to go committing changes to scripts that I wouldn’t be around to fix if I blew them up) and cleaning out my office a little bit each day, until today, my last day, I finished packing up, gave and got some hugs, and left the office for the last time.

(I then arrived home and promptly realized I’d left something at work in the fridge — some paneer a friend bought from an Indian grocery for me, that I was going to cook with tonight. Balls.)

I’m a little sad now, because after all I’d been there almost 4 years and had a lot of friends, and I understood the complicated, automated linux infrastructure because I was there to start designing it and worked with everyone as we gradually brought more people on staff — and it’s hard to let go of something that you feel like is your baby, like that. But I’m really looking forward to my summer vacation. I don’t really have any great plans; at least, nothing greater than “learn to run 5k by August,” as I signed up for an 5k run in Grant Park. I want to get up in the morning and read my Twitter feed and when I see such-and-such museum has blah-de-blah for free today!, I want to grab my CTA pass and go see it. I want to go lie around in the sunshine in Grant Park like a big lazy slacker college student on summer vacation. That’s about the sum total of my grand ambitions. Well, that, and I want to unwind a little, because seriously, 2010? You are stressing me out like whoa. So, I am now officially unemployed, for the first time since I was eligible to start working at 16. Which is 16 years, incidentally. I think I earned summer vacation.

But right now? I have friends texting me, and I have to go pop on the L and go up to the north side and drink beer while sitting on a patio in the sunshine. The weather’s supposed to get cold tomorrow, and I’ve got to take advantage while I can. And that’s just what I’m going to do.

What else? There are other things on the list, I’m just drawing a blank at the moment. Will add to this if I remember them.

(You know what’s not on the list? Freaking Disneyworld.)

Basically, I’ve come to the conclusion that I have mixed luck with achieving my goals. There are things I am good at, and things I am not. I am good at working towards things when other people are involved: I am doing well at going back to school, for example, because there are other people there along for the ride and I get docked points if I slack off, so there is a penalty factor there. (Also it’s really $%^&* expensive and no way am I spending $3500 a quarter to fail classes.) I am good at going to the gym for my regular Saturday morning appointment to get my ass kicked, because I don’t want to bail on Laura and I know she does a better job at making me exercise than I do on my own (the muscle ache for days later proves that). These are not particularly fun things for me, but I still manage to show up because there’s some sort of accountability.

However, when no one is looking, I am crap at things that are not actually fun for me: I like going outside and walking and maybe even running some, but I like to do it on my own terms (i.e., when I feel like it) rather than on a set schedule. If no one is there kicking my ass, let’s be realistic, there are a hundred unread books on my bookshelf and if I stay home and read on Tuesday night, one of my few precious school-free days, my feet won’t hurt all day tomorrow from running on asphalt.

I’ve got some accountability set up for myself on certain things, mostly in the form of 43things. 43things is great because it ties in to my great, eternal love of making lists, but it’s not written on a piece of paper to be lost. Also, I like posting my little entries about how I am ticking things off my list; I won’t lie, it’s a bit self-indulgent, maybe, but it’s also a nice record of progress. (See my 23 (!) entries on my admittedly somewhat-amorphous goal to minimize existing clutter and excess possessions. Nothing beats down a “god, I’m never getting anywhere” funk like looking over a list of, yes, I do believe that is a record of me making actual progress, woo!) Similarly, I have a journal that I started keeping years ago about all my financial stuff; that was practically magical when it came to getting all my shit in order and my credit card debt paid off.

Still, 43things or even my very most entertaining Edward Gorey-themed journal cannot push me out of bed an hour earlier to run 5 miles before work. This simple fact has not stopped me from making resolutions along those sorts of lines in the past. These are things I do not actually want to do, but think I should do, or things I feel obligated to do for reasons not at all to do with my personal commitment to them. Here’s an example: I should probably take a calcium supplement, because I hate milk and won’t drink it, so my bones will probably crumble into dust next Wednesday shortly after lunchtime. Problem is, pills are also gross, I hate them because they dissolve and taste disgusting, and as an added bonus, they are easily forgotten about. So I could make a resolution that this, 2010, this will finally be the year that I am above reproach on the osteoporosis front. But let’s be realistic. Pills are still gross (and yes, I tried Viactiv; those just sat and gathered fake-chocolaty dust), and I’m still going to forget them, and I still won’t drink milk because ew, so resolving to do that is just setting myself up to feel really guilty in about six weeks when the bottle of calcium supplements is still rattling along, totally full minus like 3 pills, camped out next to the coffeemaker where I thought for sure this time, I won’t forget it if I put it here.

Therefore, I am opting out. There’s loads of things I could work on, but in the end, seriously, I’m just not going to drink milk or run before work. I know I should get more calcium. I know it speeds up your metabolism more if you exercise in the morning rather than at night. Not knowing these things is not the problem. The problem is I’m just not going to do them, at all, ever, even a little bit, because I do not want to. So I’m not going to make any well-meaning but misguided resolutions in a vain effort to improve myself in some idealistic fashion, because it’s not going to do anything other than make me cranky and bitter. If I want to run, I’ll go run. If I want to go to school, I’ll go to school. If I want something badly enough, I’ll just do it. But I’m not going to set myself up with reasons to bitch myself out for not being good enough anymore.

So. My New Year’s resolution is to stop resolving to do things I know I’m not going to do. Take that, WASP guilt complex!